The Glade 4.0

We've discussed the studies showing that monkeys have a sense of fairness before, but this was such an awesome video clip from a TED talk on the subject that I had to share it:



Love that last line.

Wow, that's fantastic.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

How is rejecting unequal pay "fairness" and not "greed" or "Jealousy"? Especially when the grape eating monkey is perfectly content eating grapes, apparently oblivious of the fact the other monkey is not being paid "fairly".

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Unfortunately, while the monkeys are doing the same job, the "99%" aren't. Humans are not doing equal work.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Yeah, what would happen if right monkey was doing harder work for better pay? Don't get me wrong, it's cool that the monkey is able to understand the idea of "Hey He's getting grapes to do this, while I'm getting cucumbers. I should get grapes too." However it's a stretch to:

1. ascribe his motives to "fairness".
2. use that as a springboard for arguing for human social-economic change.

It appears to me that what he/she/it is doing is ascribing value to objects. myRock=cucumber, hisRock=grape. If myRock= hisRock, then myRock=grape? The first thing the monkey does when something is amiss is try to see if there is something "wrong" with hisRock.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

For whatever reason, Lex's diatribe on his issues with his "cube with a view" seem to have commonality with the OP source material.

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In time, this too shall pass.

It's not a stretch to ascribe the monkey's motives to fairness. The monkey is able to quickly figure out that he's getting a piece of cucumber in exchange for a rock, while the other monkey is getting a grape. This is also a controlled laboratory condition where one variable is changed. Wall Street is not.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I think we are having one of those cant agree what the box looks like conversations because what you are saying mostly makes sense.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

"So this is basically the Wall St. protests that you see here."

Yeah, except both monkeys were doing "working".

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Whereas most of the 1% aren't?

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yeah, the "Wall St protests" line was just a joke, although I do think that many socialist-leaning people believe that work = work to a significant degree, regardless of whether it's ditch-digging or investment banking, and that large pay differentials are therefore unfair in the same way the grape vs cucumber thing is unfair.

As for Rori's point that the experiment doesn't necessarily reveal a sense of fairness as opposed to jealousy or ascribing value to the rock rather than the work, I think those are plausible alternative interpretations. It sure looks to me like the monkey is pitching a fit because he sees he's getting shafted, but i'd be really curious to see some further experiments addressing the alternatives.

The monkey should rise up and free themselves from the cages of man and make them test subjects.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn